Grand Theft Piano

On a warm may evening in the town of Royston, England, William Barrington-Coupe is inside his tidy brick house, struggling with an overdue tax return. Heavy net curtains block the light out of a living room littered with piles of papers, handwritten bills and old letters. He's got the TV on, "for company," he says. An antique Steinway grand piano dominates the room. It is a somber scene made all the more sad because the Steinway belonged to Barrington-Coupe's wife, Joyce Hatto, an acclaimed pianist who died in this room almost a year ago. Barrington-Coupe is obviously still heartbroken. He slips one of Hatto's CDs into the stereo, and the sound of a world-class pianist bounces off the low ceiling. Close your eyes and she's here, slim hands spanning the keys. "Listen to that," he says, smiling, tears in his eyes. "She practiced until it was perfect. You won't hear a more musical performer." Except for one problem—Joyce Hatto was a fraud.

Not a small-time fraud, either. Hatto may have been the fortissimo version of Milli Vanilli. When she died of ovarian cancer at 77, she had released 119 albums—Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin—almost every one of them now suspected to have been plagiarized. Put on a Joyce Hatto CD and you'll really hear Yefim Bronfman, Ian Hobson, Vladimir Ashkenazy and dozens more, carefully copied using the latest music-editing technology. Even the experts were fooled. In 2005 Boston Globe critic Richard Dyer called her "the greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of." The irony is that ever since she was exposed three months ago—thanks to a clever CD-recognition program used by iTunes—many people have heard of her, and her allegedly plagiarizing producer: her husband. Theirs is a story of blind love and overarching ambition, as well as the questions it raises about the issues surrounding digital recording and audio plagiarism. Technology made Hatto's career, but it also destroyed it.

Hatto was actually a good pianist, if not an extraordinary one. In the 1950s she received lukewarm reviews for performances in London and Poland. Later she made the occasional recording and taught piano to private pupils. Barrington-Coupe, in an interview with NEWSWEEK—his first with an American publication—admits that for most of her life Hatto was seen as "a musical non-entity." She retired from public performance in 1976 due to illness, but in the 1990s she brought out a series of new recordings on her husband's small Concert Artist label. In Barrington-Coupe's telling, Hatto decided to record at the company studio whenever she felt well enough. She laid down a commercial CD repertoire of astonishing breadth and quality. Almost overnight, she became "a cult figure, a cause célèbre," says Gramophone magazine editor James Inverne. At the time of Hatto's death in June 2006, Concert Artist had released 119 CDs in her name. A British newspaper obituary proclaimed her "one of the greatest pianists Britain has ever produced."

The ovations lasted less than a year. When New York financial analyst Brian Ventura loaded Hatto's version of Liszt's Etudes into his computer, the online Gracenote database recognized it as Hungarian Laszlo Simon's 1987 recording of the same piece, based on the fact that both recordings were exactly the same —ength-down to one seventy-fifth of a second. Ventura e-mailed the composer and pianist Jed Distler, who had reviewed numerous Hatto discs for ClassicsToday.com. "Ten out of the 12 tracks were disturbingly similar," he says. "The thing that really made me smell a rat was on track 10. One note, the middle C, was out o— tune-on both recordings." Distler e-mailed Inverne, who commissioned Paris-based sonic expert Andrew Rose to analyze the Hatto recording. Rose confirmed the two tracks were identical, but the Hatto track was manipulated to disguise its true origins. "It was as though someone had tried to put a false beard and glasses on the recording," Inverne says.

At first Barrington-Coupe denied any knowledge of plagiarism. He told Inverne in a phone conversation in February, "I don't know how to explain it." Later, however, he wrote to the producer of the Laszlo Simon original, BIS Records CEO Robert von Bahr, apologizing profusely. He asserted Hatto's innocence, claiming he had initially spliced other performances into her originals in a desperate attempt to cover up her cancer-related gasps of pain. "I'm desperately unhappy that foolish decisions I made then to make [Joyce's] last months happier have dragged her name into the mire," he wrote.

But as in all cover-ups, the question is: what did Hatto know and when did she know it? If she didn't know, as Barrington-Coupe still maintains, she must have been recording tracks in good faith, believing her husband was then releasing her performances unadulterated except for standard editing. Most experts say that's impossible. If she had recorded all those concertos, Barrington-Coupe would have had to employ a large orchestra. "But if that's the case, why hasn't anyone from the orchestra come forward?" says music critic Christopher Howell. What's more, the British critic Jeremy Nicholas once received a letter from Hatto that read, "By the way I have reworked the Godowsky. You know me, I was never satisfied." "That means she had to have listened back," says Inverne. "And if she listened, then she knew. It's like your handwriting."